The Association of Teaching English through Multimedia (ATEM) has undergone many changes in the past decade, including changing the name from “through Movies” to “through Multimedia.” These changes are indicative of the changing times and evolving teaching landscape. With this, I have noticed several emerging research topics that I think our members can, and should, look into, but that not many of us seem to be picking up. In this post, I would like to encourage some members to go after some of these new and exciting areas, explaining what they are and why I feel they are important. In no particular order:
<Culture / Literature Related>
1. Comparative culture studies between originals and remakes
While I have seen ATEM members teach about culture through films and other sorts of media, I still see many papers that use a rather old lens to look at more modern cinema. Recently, Hollywood has been producing ever more remakes of and sequels to earlier films (e.g., Disney keeps making real-life remakes of their animated classics, and it seems that every movie popular in the 80s and 90s is getting a sequel or remake that no one asked for). Though the motivation for this is likely profit driven, at least in part, remakes and sequels offer a chance to compare the atmosphere and culture in the country from the original to the remake. While I have seen some of our members notice this, they often stop short at looking at the similarities rather than pointing out the glaring differences and what those implicate about the change in society.
2. Observing the cultural influence of the global market on Hollywood and digital media
Since Hollywood movies gain so much attention, it is not surprising that they are analyzed and used in English teaching as much as they are. One lens from which movies have often been analyzed is as good glimpse into public thought or general ideas of the time of the culture which produced the film. For example, when a county experiences periods of financial or social unease, horror or monster films often become popular (e.g., the German monster films of the 1920s, the Japanese kaiju films of the 1950s and 60s, etc.; Reimer & Reimer, 1992). However, in more recent times, Hollywood films are often changed drastically in order to appeal to a global audience, as opposed to an American one. With this in mind, do Hollywood movies really reflect American ideas and public thought anymore? Furthermore, as the country becomes increasingly divided since the early 2010s, do any films truly represent general though in America anymore?
<Education Related>
3. Innovative uses of multimedia in the English classroom
While ATEM originally focused on just the use of movies in the classroom, there are increasing chances for students to engage with a range of multimedia, and I would encourage more studies on this. Specifically, there is still much room to focus on student-created multimedia as a means of learning (e.g., Spring, 2020a), uses of short video clips presented through streaming platforms (e.g., Ramsden, 2020), and manipulations of text, videos, images, and music to create more interactive experiences (e.g. Nakamura et al., 2024). Now that ATEM focuses on a range of multimedia and it is becoming ever-easier to implement media usage both in the classroom and at home as part of extra studying or flipped-learning, more study will be needed in these areas as well. For example, some burning questions that do not have definitive answers include: Should subtitles be used or not? Does it depend on the level? Should students slow down videos if they find them too fast, or re-watch? Are listening activities better as videos? If so, does it matter what is shown in the video? For example, if students are listening to a lecture about turtles, is it better to have no video, video of a lecturer, video of turtles, or images and text? Do certain patterns promote learning or become a crutch? If we use videos outside of the classroom as part of flipped-learning, how do we ensure that students watch them? How do we turn video watching into a more interactive activity? All of these areas need ever more exploring and the results should eventually be amalgamated via meta-analyses and scoping reviews.
4. Focusing on differences in improvement when teaching English through multimedia
As teachers, our own students often become our participants, making our research quasi-experimental. One common way to test if a method is working is to use pre-/post-testing with a control and experimental group. However, if a teacher truly believes one method to be inferior, is it ethical to give one group of students a worse class to see if it is truly worse? Furthermore, how do we keep research bias out of the results in this case? More importantly, whether or not scores increase on average, there is always variance in how much students improve. I believe a more important question to try to answer when conducting educational studies is why some students improve more than others. By investigating this question instead, we can also see how valid our teaching methods are and what areas we need to improve. This sort of study can be conducted with pre- and post-tests and either regression analyses (e.g., Spring & Takeda, 2024) or repeated ANOVA with covariates (e.g., Spring, 2020b), or even by looking for common themes between our top and bottom improvers (e.g., Spring et al., 2019). If conducting regression analyses, it is a good idea to use the delta scores (post-test minus pre-test) as the dependent variable and include pre-test scores as a means of counteracting the effect of previous knowledge. Furthermore, when conducting these analyses, consider using dominance analysis for best results (Mizumoto, 2023). You can find free tools for doing this here or here: <Mizumoto Tool>, <Spring Tool>
5. The use of video materials as part of testing
Recently, some studies have suggested that using videos to test listening comprehension may be superior to using audio files alone (e.g., Kim, 2023; Suvarov, 2015). Part of the rationale is that video tests are more authentic (when do we close our eyes when talking to others?), and part of the rationale is that the videos provide more context via their visual cues, which ensures that we are testing listening ability and not the ability to conjecture what situation two speakers are in from audio clues alone. This areas is both extremely understudied, but also well within the scope of ATEM.
<Linguistics Related>
6. Checking for linguistic change in spoken English
Thanks to the movie corpus (Davies, 2019), it is easier than ever to conduct corpus studies on linguistic elements and match these to dates when they emerge and how frequent they are in particular decades. As should be apparent to any linguist, language is always changing and evolving. As movies tend to be a good gauge for commonly known and understood spoken registers, they can also be used to track changes in the English language. Not only is this good for finding out the latest trends in slang and new expressions, but it can also help us to know when certain expressions and turns of phrase have begun to fade away. A good example is of the past tense of the verb “dream” in American English. While both “dreamt” and “dreamed” were both quite common up until the 1950s, the former began to fall out of usage, and is rarely used in recent times. However, I’m sure this is not the only change, as I often notice differences in my own vernacular and that of my parents and older generations.
7. Linking linguistic examples to SLA
Many linguistics papers have been published in the ATEM journal that apply theory to actual examples found in visual media, such as movies. However, more work is still required to point out the benefits of teaching these discoveries from a second language acquisition (SLA). For example, it could prove beneficial to find examples of theoretically difficult to parse syntactic or semantic structures from film and visual media and then test how well students are able to understand these expressions when presented with them. While we often assume that students have some syntactic or semantic knowledge, SLA studies that test students’ ability to parse or understand such structures do not always produce results congruent with our assumptions. This is especially true in the context of visual media, as the various context clues from the visual media may actually provide students with the extra information required for them to understand the supposedly difficult structures. Therefore, I believe work is warranted as to which are difficult to understand both with and without visual media, what the differences in these types are. This may help further our understanding of the types of visual media that we need to use to help students understand linguistically difficult structures more easily. This potentially overlaps with suggestion (5).
It is my hope that by suggesting some of these potential topics and tools, ATEM members can potentially branch out into new topics or use their pre-existing knowledge to help solve some of these mysteries. I also encourage new, young researchers to pick up some of these topics and areas, and potentially reach out to me or other, more senior ATEM members for help. There are a lot of possibilities and potential in our field, and yet, much of it remains unexplored. I implore the next generation or researchers and educators to begin looking into these topics, and the current and older generations of researchers and educators to help the next generations to develop the skills to research these topics in depth and present their results so that we may all benefit from their findings.
References and Suggested Readings
Davies, M. (2019) The Movie Corpus. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/movies/.
Kim, J. (2023, September 15). Test takers’ interaction with context videos in a video-based listening test: A conceptual replication and extension of Suvorov (2015). https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/r83by
Nakamura, S., Spring, R, & Sakurai, S. (2024) The impact of ASR-based interactive video activities on speaking skills: Japanese EFL learners’ perceptions. TESL-EJ, 27(4). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.27108a5
Ramsden, T. (2020). Jiritsuteki gakushu o unagasu jugyogai gakushu no kokoromi: YouTube bideo report [An attempt at encouraging autonomous study outside of the classroom: YouTube video reports]. ATEM Journal, 25, 17–30. https://doi.org/10.24499/atemnew.25.0_17
Reimer, R., & Reimer, C. (1992) Nazi-retro film: How German narrative cinema remembers the past. Twayne.
Mizumoto, A. (2023). Calculating the relative importance of multiple regression predictor variables using dominance analysis and random forests. Language Learning, 73(1), 161–196. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12518
Spring, R. (2020a). Can Video-creation Project Work Affect Students’ Oral Proficiency? An Analysis of Fluency, Complexity and Accuracy. TESL-EJ, 24(2). http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume24/ej94/ej94a1/
Spring, R. (2020b). Maximizing the benefits of video-creation PBLL in the EFL classroom: A preliminary analysis of factors associated with improvement in oral proficiency. STEM Journal, 21(4), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.16875/stem.2020.21.4.107
Spring, R., & Takeda, J. (2024). Teaching phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions through multimodal flashcards. STEM Journal, 25(2), 40–53. https://doi.org/10.16875/stem.2024.25.2.40
Spring, R., Kato, F., & Mori, C. (2019). Factors associated with improvement in oral fluency when using Video-Synchronous Mediated Communication with native speakers: An analysis of 3 years of data from a Skype partner program. Foreign Language Annals, 52(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12381
Suvorov, R. (2015). The use of eye tracking in research on video-based second language (L2) listening assessment: A comparison of context videos and content videos. Language Testing, 32(4), 463–483. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532214562099